This was the thing that made Steve Jobs so great

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It's been years since Apple cofounder Steve Jobs passed away. But he remains a role model for many today - the gold standard of a tech visionary.

One of the few men who could call himself Steve Jobs' boss, former Apple CEO John Sculley, talks about why in his new book, "Moonshot."

"Steve was not an engineer — he just saw different things that people were working on and connected the dots between them," Sculley wrote in his new book, notes the New York Post.

Sculley gave the example of how Jobs added calligraphy fonts to the Mac, which created a new market for the Mac as a way to do home-grown document publishing.

"That was something no one was working on at the time," Sculley said.

Obviously, it's not that easy to look at the world, see what's missing and deliver a high-quality product that fits the bill. Otherwise, we'd all be Steve Jobs.

John Sculley
Michael Seto/Business Insider
Sculley, who will forever be known as the guy that fired Steve Jobs (a story Sculley calls a "myth"), admits as much, too.

In an interview with Business Insider's Jay Yarow, Sculley said, "Steve always had an extraordinary talent. He was always a genius. He always saw things ahead of the rest of the world. He had a brilliance that was every bit as apparent back in the era when I worked with him as when we saw him when he was incredibly successful 15 years later."

But there are ways that you can become more of a visionary like Steve Jobs, innovation consultant Phil McKinney, says. He offered a step-by-step plan for that in his book, Beyond The Obvious.

Some of that involves practicing creative thinking such as changing your routines, brainstorming regularly and giving up the idea that you don't have the resources (money, time, talent, manpower) to accomplish your idea once you land on one.